


Sunset

by KyberChronicles



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2018-10-20 09:19:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10659588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KyberChronicles/pseuds/KyberChronicles
Summary: She understands, now, because unsaid words of her own are bubbling up to her own lips as her pulse becomes a countdown.Her breaths are limited now, too, but she decides to spend one on his name.“Cassian.”** COMPLETELY REWRITTEN, 10/4/17 **





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally for the prompt "Stardust" from the "rebelcaptainprompts" Tumblr, but doesn't really apply anymore. Needless to say, after a VERY long period of writer's block, I decided to rewrite this completely, since I felt like it was really out-of-character and not... good. 
> 
> That being said, I think I might have a second chapter in me, but I can't make any promises. Keep your fingers crossed for me?
> 
> Thanks for reading!

When it happens, it’s not quite as dramatic as she expects.

After all, the closest she had come before was on Scarif, dodging explosions and blaster fire and a wave of earth determined to swallow her whole.

The sins of her father made real.

_ Jyn, _ he had said.   _ I have so much to tell you. _

She understands, now, because unsaid words of her own are bubbling up to her own lips as her pulse becomes a countdown.

Her breaths are limited now, too, but she decides to spend one on his name.

“Cassian.”

And, oh, she wants to stay.  She wants to press her lips to that crease between his eyebrows and the circles under his eyes until they disappear.  She wants to chase the warmth she sees in his eyes when he looks at her, let it burn her whole.

She wants to stay because he is the only one who has, for her.

But she made the choice to leave him to save him, and she can’t regret that.  That blaster bolt would steal all of her remaining heartbeats instead of his.  

After all, they belonged to him anyway.

Did he even know?

He’s saying her name, and it echoes dimly in her mind.  

“Don’t you dare die for me, Jyn, do you hear me? Don’t you  _ dare _ . That’s an order.”

She’s never been very good at taking orders.  Not even if her life depended on it.

And it does, now.

She will try, though.  Not because it’s an order from a commanding officer, not for this war, not for the freedom of the galaxy, or the battle against evil…

But because he asked her to.  And she wants to give him so much more than just heartbeats and years and time.  She wants him to know why she would, why she did-- this man that breaks himself for the cause.  She remembers it all so vividly: the long list of broken bones on a datapad, his anguished yell for his fallen droid, the way he held her on the beach.

_ “Every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget, I told myself it was for a cause that I believed in.” _

But he couldn’t forget, she knows that now.  She heard it in his nightmares, muffled noises from his bunk that pulled at her relentlessly.  

She’s not the only one that lost everything.

Everything, in the end, except him.

The ship is rumbling under her back, careening through the cosmos back to base, but the chill of Hoth has already crept into her veins and stolen all sensation from her fingers and toes.  His hands are pressing against her belly, his trembling fingers brushing against her ribs.  

It’s the most intimate touch they’ve shared since she found herself in his arms on those golden sands.  A horizon on fire.  

She looks at him through the blurry, darkened filter that has overtaken her sight.  His eyes are wide and panicked, his mouth turned down into a frown.  His chest is heaving.

If the last gift she ever receives is this rare refusal to disappear behind his emotionless spy-mask, it’s the best one she’s ever gotten.

In return, she decides to give him another of her last breaths.  She doesn’t really think about it, after the sudden, desperate urge to clear the frown from his face takes hold.  

Perhaps it’s the blood loss.  

“Why does it take me dying for you to put your hands on me?”

It takes two breaths, but she doesn’t mind.  He can have them all.

She watches his gaze move from the wound he’s pressing down on, up to her face.  He looks at her like he can’t quite believe what’s happening.  It takes him a moment to answer.

“Stay with me,” he finally tells her, a bit breathless himself.  “And I’ll remedy that.”

“Is that a promise?” Another breath used, but definitely not wasted.

He huffs a laugh that doesn’t quite meet his eyes.

“You have my word.”

And, well.  That (and the smile that threatens the corner of his mouth for just a quick moment, the faint blush that blooms across his cheekbones) has her fighting against the growing darkness and lifting her hands to crystal around her neck to beg the Force for more time.

_ Again _ , she remembers-- the flickering lights of a plummeting hydrolift mirror those above her, now.  How much borrowed time have they been given already? How much have they wasted?  How many words had she kept unsaid?  How many touches had she kept back? 

_ I have so much to tell you. _

He pleads with her to be still, gathering up her hands and the necklace in his own, the other still trying to hold her life inside her.  

“Just hold on a little longer, we’re almost there,” he tells her.

_ Where?  _

She is floating for a moment, unsure of where she is, unable to focus.

And then she’s right where she wants to be, on this beach with him. His hands are warm, this time, and it comforts her.

But he’s calling to her from so far away…

And yet he’s not, because he’s there next to her, in the sand.  The breeze is ruffling through his hair and his dark eyes are focused so intensely on hers that she feels like she can’t breathe.  She welcomes the sensation, as scary as it is, because it feels like she’s falling.  She much prefers it this way--  his face is free from pain, his body unbroken and unblemished.

“Don’t go, Jyn,” she hears him beg, both anguished and serene.  “Stay with me.”

“I’m here,” takes her last breath.

But she's not.  She's gone.


	2. Sunrise

Jyn Erso disappears from Cassian’s life for five days.

For all five of those days, it is unclear whether she will ever come back.

She is replaced with a still and silent body.  Sometimes it lies in a bed, looking too pale and fragile to be his partner.  Sometimes it floats lifelessly in a bacta tank, dark hair suspended over its head like a halo.

Logic (which sounds eerily similar to Kay) tells him that he lived without her for twenty-six years, so his survival beyond this is almost guaranteed.

But just as it was on Eadu, when he saw her in the eyes of her father, logic is rendered useless.  

For the first few hours after she is pulled from his grip and transferred to the medbay, he sits in the waiting room and stares at her blood on his hands until it dries and cracks, settling into the lines that cut across his palms. The deep, solid groove from his pointer finger all the way to the side of his hand catches his eye the most.

It was supposed to be his: the blaster bolt, the blood spilt, the body laying lifeless on the floor of the cargo hold.

She stole his death like she stole his blaster.

Once a thief, always a thief, he supposes.

Eventually night comes.  He can only tell because the base grows quieter, colder.

At some point, General Draven takes the seat next to him.  

(It takes him ten minutes to notice.  A new record, for the “rebellion’s best intelligence agent”.)

The older man wordlessly shoves a cup of hot caf into his bloody hands.  

He barely hears the sigh that’s Draven asking, “What happened out there, Andor?”

_ He’s lifting her into his arms, surprised at how light she is when she has the strength of a Wookie and the gravitational pull of a sun.  His one hand is gripping her side where she was hit, his fingers warm and wet. _

_ She’s protesting angrily until she isn’t anymore and her head is leaning on him.  Worry wraps around his chest and squeezes and he’s calling her name, begging her to stay awake. _

_ He’s laying her across the few seats in the hold and forcing himself to leave her, just this one time and then never again, to get them up and off the planet.   _

_ When autopilot takes over and they’re rocketing through hyperspace, he’s kneeling next to her with his heart in his throat.  She’s looking at him far too fondly for the world to not be ending.   _

_ "Cassian.” _

If that was the last time he would hear her say his name, he never wants to have it spoken by anyone else, ever again.  He’ll ask Draven to assign him a call-sign, a random mix of letters and numbers with no real meaning.  

Just like the Stormtroopers she once compared him to.

The memory burns.

He is vaguely aware that there are words being spoken, something about granting him temporary leave but needing him back in a few days.  The nod he gives his commanding officer is purely muscle memory.

He is alone again.

Minutes, hours, days, maybe lifetimes later, a nurse approaches him and he braces for impact.

He hears words like “bacta”, “internal bleeding”, and “lack of proper supplies and equipment”.

None of it matters, really, except:

“Is she alive?”

He gasps it aloud like it’s being punched out of him.

The answer: “Yes. For now.”

Four days pass.  They are both endless and a blur, anchored only by the moments he silently watches her body floating in the bacta tank.  He does not sleep.  He eats and drinks only when one of the nurses pushes one or the other into his hands with knowing eyes.  He remembers her, from Yavin.  It took nine days, after they escaped Scarif on a barely functioning patrol transport, for him to wake up and find Jyn curled up in the chair next to his cot.  She had stared silently at him, those eyes of hers that stormed like the sea, and then gripped his hand.

It was this nurse that told him, after Jyn had finally succumbed to sleep, that she hadn’t left his side for the entirety of those nine days.  At the time, he had chalked it up to her not knowing where else to go.

And yet.

_ “Why does it take me dying for you to put your hands on me?” _

She lives, and yet she still haunts him.  

At some point during the fourth day, he turns to find Draven sitting next to him again, handing him more caf.

The man looks frustrated.

“For kriff’s sake, Andor, go get some sleep.  I’ll have them comm you if anything changes.”

“Yes, sir,” he answers automatically.  He doesn’t move.  He takes a long sip of the caf.

“That’s an order, Captain.”

“I understand, sir.”

He should’ve been expecting the drowsiness that slowly settles over him in the next few minutes, but then it’s too late and all he can do is curse, helplessly, in his home language.  The words don’t even bite-- they tumble slowly out of his mouth.  His eyes slowly slide from the caf to Draven, who merely raises an eyebrow.  

“I said it was an  _ order _ , not a suggestion.”

He fights the weight on his eyelids, the dimming of his vision, the slow tilt of the earth for as long as he can.  He’s had to before-- the same man who drugged him taught him how.  The irony is lost on him, however, if there even is any to begin with.  He can’t be sure.  

And then he can’t be sure of anything but darkness.

He wakes with her name and the salt of an ocean on his tongue.

When he opens his eyes, he is on a cot in the medbay, and the nurse he remembers is handing him a cup of water and a nutrient bar.  He catches her looking at him with grim expression before she quickly blinks it away.

Even slow with sleep, he is too observant to miss it.

It’s pity, and it curdles in his guts like bad Bantha milk.  It’s a rare thing to be shown towards him, the practiced murderer that he is.  But he’s seen it in the faces of the other nurses in the medbay, particularly after Scarif.  He’s seen it in the eyes of fellow rebels, back when he still lived in shared quarters, when he’d scream himself awake from nightmares.  So the rarity is a blessing, because that look means he’s shown too much, he’s let the mask slip.

Except…

Jyn never looked at him like that.  And she knocked the mask clear off of his face the minute she darted into battle to save a child.  He hasn’t been able to fix it back on properly ever since.

He realizes that he’s thinking about her in past tense and it rattles him into asking what he almost doesn’t want to know.

“She is out of bacta submersion, but still unconscious.  She lost a lot of blood.  We’ve done what we could.  All we can do now is hope.”

_ Hope? _

He remembers her staring up at him, skeptical and bitterly amused, the hint of a laugh in her eyes.  He had stepped in too close to catch it before it disappeared and, oh, she was already burning him at the edges then and he hadn’t even realized it.

“You’ve been asleep for about twenty hours.  You need to hydrate and replenish.  That general has been asking about your status, but I told him that I couldn’t sign off on your release until we did more tests to determine the cause of your…  _ sudden unconsciousness _ .”

Her tone reeks of disapproval.  They both know the cause of it, clearly.  But there’s a vague gratitude towards the nurse for keeping Draven at bay.  He’ll be wanting him back out in the field.  The thought of leaving Jyn alone and unconscious has his hands clenching and he’s sitting up, needing to see her for himself.  

“Easy, Captain. Take it slow.  I don’t want you passing out on my floor.”

The nurse is helping him stand slowly.  His back is stiff, but he hides a wince from her to keep her from inquiring about his older injuries.  She leads him to one of the few single rooms the medbay has available, and he’s relieved: Jyn would not want anyone to see her so vulnerable.

But then  _ he _ is seeing it, and his chest seizes for a moment at how young and small she looks, wrapped in the pristine, white bedding.  His eyes are glued to the rise and fall of her chest-- the reminder that she is still alive, still breathing.  

The nurse leaves.  He’s grateful for the privacy, since he’s struggling with the usually firm hold he has on his emotions.  He can literally feel the distress he’s displaying on his face-- wide eyes, pronounced frown, furrowed eyebrows, shorter breaths, accelerated heartbeat--but can’t school them into neutrality.

She hates his “spy face”, as she calls it, so it’s not what will bring her back to him now.

He doesn’t bother sitting on the chair that’s been pulled up to her cot.  He sits right on the edge of the thin mattress, his thigh pressing gently against her, needing to be as close to her as possible.  

As usual.

She’s warm, and he finds more relief in that.  She was so cold when she was bleeding on the floor of their ship.  He stares at her hand lying on the bed before slowly and carefully running his thumb over the ridges of her knuckles.

He is ridiculously out of his his depth.  

Jyn has always been the brave one.  It was she who stood before the council, with no proof to offer but her own conviction.  It was she who led them to victory on a uneven battlefield, with the nothing but hope and chance to guide them.  It was she who flipped the switch on that data tower and gave birth to a truly formidable rebellion.  

She approaches all things with that unyielding determination, he’s learned.  Their relationship was no exception.  Sure, she has fears and defenses that trip them up, every so often.  But she’s never held back with him, whether it was their confrontation after Eadu or whatever was developing between them now.

_ “Why does it take me dying for you to put your hands on me?” _

He, on the other hand, has lived a life of calculation and carefully planned maneuvers.  He is an observer, a shadow-- and when not that, a carefully arranged picture that fit whatever he wanted to portray to his chosen audience.  He’s learned to expertly improvise if a situation calls for it, but most of the time, he avoids anything that would create that need.  He chooses his battles.  He is collected and calm.  He is detached.

Well.

He  _ was _ .  

He can be.

But not with her.  

She has been stripping away all of his layers, with her tiny, strong hands.  She is the closest anyone has ever come to the  _ real _ him, probably since his mother.

His mother, who called him “mi corazoncito callado”.

_ My quiet, little heart. _

He thought that part of him had disappeared completely, kept hidden for too many years behind his aliases, behind the obedient soldier, behind the assassin with more blood on his hands than he could ever hope to wash off.

Only Jyn brings that shy, gentle boy out of him.  

The part of him that has  _ no idea what he’s doing _ .  

It humiliates and frustrates him, but it also makes him feel more alive than he’s felt in years.  His heart pounds, his palms sweat, his throat dries, his hands tremble.

But that doesn’t make him want it--want _ her-- _ any less.

And so he gently takes her hand, stays, and hopes.  

The hours pass.  The nurses come in and out, checking on her vitals, saying nothing to him.  He focuses on the string around her neck, the one that holds the kyber crystal her mother gave her.  He’s glad they didn’t take it off of her, even if it was just for superstition’s sake.  

He remembers her clutching it when they reached the shield gates of Scarif, the smile that nearly blinded him when they were allowed through.  

He would give anything to see it again.

And then, as if the galaxy heard him, there is a slight pressure on his hand.

His eyes snap up to her face immediately.

“Jyn?”

The sliver of green that appears, ever so slowly, becomes his favorite color.  Relief washes over him, overwhelming.  He lets out a breath that he feels like he’s been holding in for days.  His chest aches with it.  He grips her hand, tightly.

Outside, the sun rises.

Later, after tests prove that she is truly on the mend, he remembers he has a promise to keep.  

He hasn’t been able to take his eyes off her-- the color in her cheeks, the fluttering of her eyelashes, the movement of her fingers.

He decides he owes her better than his promise.

He’s moved to the chair beside her cot, giving the nurses room to work, so he reaches over and gently takes her hand in both of his, skimming his thumb over her knuckles once more.

She is watching him, silently.

He moves the chair closer, then slowly lowers his head and presses his lips to the tops of each of her fingers, one by one.

His eyes never leave hers.

Then he carefully flips her hand over, cradling it, and places a long, lingering kiss in the center of her palm.  The action causes her fingertips to ghost across his jaw, and he nearly shivers at the sensation.

Suddenly, a machine on the wall beeps loudly.  Her fingers twitch.

A med-droid zooms into the room.

“Patient One-Two-One-Zero-One-Six, there has been a sudden increase in your heart rate, which can indicate pain.  Do you require medication?”

He grins against the skin of her palm, refusing to release her.  

“N-no,” she breathes, then clears her throat.  “I’m fine.”

“Patient One-Two-One-Zero-One-Six, your breathing capacity has decreased. Do you require oxygen?”

She levels a glare at the droid, and he is fighting the laugh bubbling up in his chest.

“Get lost, rust bucket.”

There is a series of offended beeps, and then it is whirring away and out of the room.

The blush that has rises to her cheeks becomes his  _ second _ favorite color.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I suggest listening to “Where’s My Love” by SYML with this.)
> 
> Thank you, so much, for reading this, first of all.
> 
> Secondly, this is the end of a VERY long period of writer's block, and sort of a breath of relief, if I'm being honest. Phew!
> 
> Come say hi on tumblr, if you'd like, I'm under the same name: KyberChronicles.


End file.
